Your marketing team will only perform well if you have solid marketing operations in place. In this article, you’ll find the most useful expert tips on implementing marketing operations to improve your company’s overall marketing effectiveness.
Included on this page, you’ll find information about the main pillars of marketing operations, best practices for marketing operations, top KPIs in marketing operations, and how marketing operations can help you align marketing and sales departments for success.
Marketing operations (MOPs) refers to the activities required to implement and oversee the technology and processes that foster an effective marketing team. A marketing operations team helps drive positive marketing results for a company.
Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of the Pedowitz Group, a marketing consulting company based in Atlanta, says that one of the biggest mistakes companies make is underinvesting (or not investing at all) in marketing operations.
“I think that most companies don’t understand the importance of marketing operations and often end up overlooking it or misappropriating it,” he says.
Pedowitz adds that marketers must hone their brand and creative marketing, while also focusing on the data and analytics that measure results.
“You really can’t have one without the other,” he continues. “It’s really about getting marketing (and business) leaders to understand how important marketing operations is to the team. MOPs gives you the tools and the analysis to demonstrate value to the business.”
Here are some of the primary characteristics of marketing operations:
The stakeholders for marketing operations include certain organizational leaders, namely the CEO, CIO, CMO, and director of marketing. By delivering the results that these leaders expect, MOPs can demonstrate that it’s performing well.
These stakeholders expect the following from marketing operations:
To learn more about managing marketing campaigns, visit “The Definitive Guide to Marketing Campaign Management.” You can also find easy-to-use templates for your marketing campaigns at “Free Marketing Campaign Templates and Guide.”
Marketing operations covers a wide range of areas and duties, which experts sometimes categorize in different ways. Still, the work generally falls into three categories, or pillars: process management, marketing technology management, and data analytics and management.
When a company markets itself to potential customers, such work involves multiple processes. Marketing operations must ensure that those processes make sense and deliver the best results for the company. Those processes include the following:
Morgan from Radically Distinct defines brand compliance as, “Helping to determine how to create a perception in the marketplace and then managing that perception in order to continually attract the types of customers you want.”
The privacy of patient information
The potential risks to the consumer of such health products
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
Affordable Care Act
Truth in Healthcare Marketing Act of 2017
Claims about financial products
Consumer disclosures about products or services
State Bar Associations
Federal Trade Commission
Food and Drug Administration
Federal Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau
Securities and Exchange Commission
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act
There are now thousands of technology solutions that help marketing teams do their jobs. These tech solutions help you create content, promote that content, organize social media, and manage projects, among many other tasks.
To download easy-to-use templates for marketing projects, visit “Free Marketing Project Plan Templates.” To learn about the technology that can help you manage marketing projects and processes, visit “How to Pick Marketing Project Management Tools and Software” and “Is Marketing Resource Management (MRM) Dead?”
One of the core responsibilities of marketing operations is managing all of a company’s marketing technology. This means helping the company determine which technology solution best fits its needs and budget, as well as staying abreast of evolutions in technology in order to help the company make necessary upgrades. And, accordingly, it means helping employees understand the new technology and fully leverage its capabilities.
Pedowitz notes that “Owners or managers may think that with more technology, they need fewer people — when the opposite is true. If you truly want to get the most out of the technology, you need people who have the skills to run it and leverage it. Otherwise, you’re sitting on a bunch of expensive technology, and you’re not really changing how you’re doing marketing.”
Source: Simon Daniels, Percassity Associates
The third key pillar of responsibility in marketing operations is data analytics and management. Some experts consider this particular area to be the most important, as marketing operations must gather, track, and analyze a wide range of data.
Such data concerns the following: a company’s products or services; how the company markets those products or services; and how customers and potential customers react to those products or services (as a result of such marketing efforts).
Marketing operations must do the following:
Collins of Vult Lab says that data analytics is essential to doing “predictive modeling, analysis reporting for clients, and internal reviewing, to make sure your campaigns are actually moving the way they need to be moving.”
“Analytics, or reporting, or measurement — however you want to term it — is about understanding the outcome of the marketing that you're undertaking and, ultimately, knowing what that effort’s return on investment is,” says Simon Daniels, a London-based marketing operations consultant and Principal with Percassity Associates.
To learn more about technology and systems that can assist with all of this marketing information, visit “The Definitive Guide to Marketing Information Management & Systems.”
Some experts believe that marketing operations includes a fourth pillar that’s separate from the three listed above: employee training.
Marketing operations often helps to continually enhance the skills of the entire marketing team. MOPs achieves this goal by providing ongoing training in the use of new technology and by helping to improve staff skills as the marketing industry evolves. (To learn more about certifications that can enhance a professional marketer’s expertise, visit “Can Marketing Certifications Maximize Your Career?”)
As your company launches a marketing campaign or works to improve a marketing process, you need to lay out a marketing operations strategy. That strategy should identify both your goals and your tactics for reaching those goals.
Here are some critical steps for creating a marketing strategy:
In our "Expert Tips on Building an Outstanding Marketing Operations Team" article, you’ll get the most useful expert advice on how to build a marketing operations team, including details on important roles and required skills.
Experts recommend a number of best practices to help your company optimize its marketing operations. These best practices include aligning operations with overall business strategy, establishing strong processes, and working continuously to understand your customers.
Here are some recommended best practices:
“You want to understand who your potential customer is, or who you should be going for as your potential customer,” says Morgan. “You want to have a description of who your customer is, and then be able to justify all of the things that you're trying to set up and do, based on how they move through your sales process.”
From there, MOPs must help the company understand the customers’ “First Moment of Truth” and their “Second Moment of Truth.” The First Moment of Truth occurs when the customer decides to buy the product, and the Second Moment of Truth defines the customer experience with the product after buying it.
“This basically means that there's this deliberation period now, when the whole buying process for a customer has changed,” says Morgan. “Your customers are going out and they're checking out your website, they're looking at all these potential competitors, and they're comparing you against these other companies.
“I would say the number one mistake that I have seen everybody make in their marketing process is that it's not a complete sales cycle,” Morgan says. “They have this arbitrary idea that marketing is this thing you do over here, and sales is this thing you do over here. And they don’t work together in any way.”
This means that potential customers who might need answers to questions about a product aren’t appropriately given those answers, she says. Then, they leave, without ever becoming customers.
“Outsourcing is an important skill for marketing operations,” says Morgan. She says that, especially as a company starts a marketing operations initiative, it may need specialists to implement some structures.
“It needs to be broken down into activities that are daily, weekly, monthly … in order to achieve a set goal,” says Morgan. “And then, once you have that process down, you can ask, ‘Did we achieve these goals?’ And if so, ‘Did we actually do all those activities?’ If we did, ‘Did it generate the results? How short of those goals were we?’
Strong marketing operations provides a number of benefits to your marketing team and to your overall company. It helps ensure that your marketing is strategic and that it aligns with company goals. It also helps you understand customers and their needs.
Here are some of the main benefits of good marketing operations:
The benefit of this is especially noticeable in companies that don’t have staff devoted to marketing operations, says Daniels, of Percassity Associates.
Marketing operations experts predict significantly increased automation and that sales and marketing teams will merge within some companies.
Detailed expectations for the future of marketing operations are as follows:
Marketing operations existed long before it became known as such. Here are some notable times and dates during the development of the discipline:
Marketing operations within a marketing agency helps increase efficiencies and better coordinate the work of everyone within the agency. It improves communication, saves money, and increases customer satisfaction.
According to many experts, a company should create a marketing operations role when technological demands and efforts at collaboration are noticeably slowing down the marketing team.
Some MOPs gurus go further: They say that marketing operations is so vital to a company that the second hire of any marketing team should be for an oversight role. Therefore, a two-person marketing department should consist of one marketing position and one marketing operations position. In fact, even in a one-person marketing department, the individual employee should be performing marketing as well as MOPs tasks.
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